London has been battered by 50mph winds that have felled trees and caused travel chaos. Powerful gusts swept across the capital as the Met Office issued a yellow "be aware" weather alert for most of the country.

The BBC’s new Director-General, Tony Hall, as with his short-lived predecessor, George Entwistle, isn’t being allowed a honeymoon. He has become embroiled in two controversies within two weeks of arriving at the Corporation.

There is the little matter of Panorama’s under-cover excursion into North Korea and the unhappy compromise over the broadcasting of the appropriated anti-Thatcher anthem, Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead.

Unsurprisingly, both issues have attracted criticism from the usual suspects — the newspapers that cannot stomach the culture and, arguably, even the existence of Britain’s public-service broadcaster.

Hall’s appointment was the result of Entwistle’s failure to grasp the need for the chief of the nation’s largest media organisation to handle a media feeding frenzy. Now we will see whether Baron Hall of Birkenhead, to give him his full title, can do better.

He has already made one bad call. His intervention in the Ding Dong affair was an unsatisfactory compromise.

Running an explanatory news item was fine but restricting the song to a seven-second clip appeared unduly partial.

That problem may occur again in coming weeks, though I doubt it will cause Hall anything like the headache he is facing over the Panorama incident.

He must realise that the BBC’s press critics will not let it drop, so he has to hold some kind of inquiry to discover how it came about.

There is nothing wrong with journalists using subterfuge in the public interest, and obtaining information about North Korea, where a dictator is threatening to launch a nuclear strike, is both justifiable and topical.

On the face of it, the methodology employed by Panorama’s team, headed by reporter John Sweeney, was reasonable enough. They were posing as students from the London School of Economics on a study trip organised by Sweeney’s wife, Tomiko.

She must have been encouraged that the ruse would work smoothly because she pulled off a similar trick last year without attracting any diplomatic hostility (or media attention) after filing a despatch on BBC’s Radio 4 about life in Pyongyang.

Clearly, this time around, some of the students — three out of 10 evidently — felt they had been duped and placed in harm’s way. The LSE’s chairman, Peter Sutherland, took up their complaints by going public and demanding that the BBC pull its programme.

At that point, I found myself wholly on Panorama’s side.

Surely the LSE was making too much of a fuss. The BBC explained that the students had been informed in advance about the risks and the fact that they were a cover for a covert journalistic mission.

But it later emerged that no written consent was obtained from the students, some claimed they were not told what was happening until they reached Beijing and there was a further suspicion that they were not made fully aware of the risks. I also agree that the LSE also makes a good point about the incident placing a question mark over the supposed neutrality of academic researchers working in future in “hostile” countries.

So, in order to clear the air — and assuage demands for blood by rival media — Hall must discover exactly what happened. My hunch is that it was nothing more than a misunderstanding by the complaining students.

Whatever the case, Hall needs to be on top of his brief. Harsh though it may seem, he will be judged on how he deals with his first crisis. And he can be sure there will be many more.

This episode will also serve to warn of problems ahead for Hall’s appointee as the Corporation’s director of news and current affairs — former editor of The Times, James Harding. Then again, he knows all about press hostility towards the BBC, does he not?

Roy Greenslade is Professor of Journalism, City University London, and writes a blog for the Guardian